A NSW Government website
Assessment Certification Examination (ACE)
NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA)

Student appeals against assessment rankings in HSC courses - school review of assessments

ACE 11011

Last Updated: 1 April 2019

Details of review procedures are the responsibility of individual schools. NESA recommended procedures to be employed within schools are outlined below.

As the final school assessment marks are not available to students, any assessment review will be based on the rank order placement as indicated on the Assessment Rank Order Notices and feedback on their performance during the course. Students who consider that their placement in the rank order for any course is not correct on the basis of feedback on their performance during the course may seek a school review.

Students are not entitled to seek a review of teachers’ judgements of the worth of individual performance in assessment tasks. The marks or grades awarded for individual tasks will not be subject to review as part of this process. Any disputes over an individual task must be resolved at the time the task is returned to the student.

In conducting an assessment review it is necessary for the school to ascertain whether:

  1. the weightings specified by the school in its assessment program conform with NESA requirements as detailed in the syllabus packages
  2. the procedures used by the school for determining the final assessment mark conform with its stated assessment program – in particular, the weightings used for the various assessment tasks should be consistent with those specified in the assessment program
  3. there are no computational or other clerical errors in the determination of the assessment mark.

Provided the school is satisfied that these conditions have been met, no change to the assessment will be made.

The school must inform the student of the outcome of the school review of their assessment and advise them of the provision for subsequent appeal to NESA. The advice on this appeal to NESA should include information about grounds for appeal.